There are many IT optimization and management situations in which it is desirable or even necessary to obtain detailed inventory and dependency information from dormant computer systems. Current solutions only allow for obtaining superficial inventory from dormant computer systems, or detailed inventory from actively running computer systems, but not detailed inventory from dormant computer systems.
In science, the word ‘dormant’ is used to mean “latent but capable of being activated.” Similarly, in the context of this application, the term ‘dormant computer system’ is used to mean “a collection of computer files that by themselves aren't an active running computer system but can form the basis of one.” Examples of dormant systems include virtual machine images (which can be directly used by a hypervisor to instantiate virtual machines), computer disk partitions, and ISO images (an ISO image is an archive file (also known as a disc image) of an optical disc in a format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)) stored on a compact disk (CD).
Analysis and forensics capabilities on dormant systems are available from, for example, Brett Shavers, “Virtual Forensics: A Discussion of Virtual Machines Related to Forensics Analysis,” and D. Bem et al., “Analysis of USB Flash Drives in a Virtual Environment,” Small Scale Digital Device Forensics Journal, 1(1), June 2007. The utility of these techniques is generally limited to examining the files on those systems.